It's been a rather busy week this week - in a good way generally, lots of nice orders from my Etsy shop - it would seem Christmas shopping has well and truly started! So last night involved a whole lot of wrapping of parcels and addressing labels.

It's rather exciting times...anyway, there has also been exciting times on the Twitter front {hooray!}. I have passed the 300 follower mark, a mini milestone shall we say...so I thought I'd mark the occasion with a little giveaway.

SO, to be in with a chance of winning one of these little beauties...all you need to do is follow me on Twitter {@ohnorachio} and then RT my tweet about this little giveaway. Couldn't be easier eh? I'd love it if you could share the love with your buddies - the more the merrier.

I'll be picking the winner at random next Thursday via Twitter and here so keep your eyes and ears peeled and good luck!

Today is a rather exciting day, I had a rather amazing time at Wilderness Festival with Jack at the weekend, and now it is time for me to announce the winner of my very first blog competition...hoorah!

I would like to congratulate the lovely Louise Wright {follow her on Twitter @louillustrator - she's a very talented lady!} - Twix clearly found her piece of paper very appealing - as you can see below.

Twix did a marvellous {and very thorough} job of choosing the winner. She spent a good minute rooting around in the bowl of names before emerging with one piece of paper in her mouth...they say never work with children or animals - but she was a gem to work with {I had visions of her a: not picking any out and being totally disinterested or b: picking/kicking out many names from the bowl}.

Apologies for the somewhat blurry photos I was desperately trying to catch the events unfold, and grab the piece of paper before she stuffed it into her cheek pouch!

Thank you a thousand times to those who entered {over 100 of you lovely people!!}, if you didn't win, do not despair - I shall be holding another exciting giveaway very soon so please do keep your eyes peeled for the next one!

I hope you all had a lovely weekend, I'll be sharing some festival photos later this week!

The day is upon us, I'm super excited, it's time for my very first blog competition....drum roll please!

With summer now fully upon us, I thought I'd put together a little prize pack perfect for a little bit of summer travel...

The competition is super easy to enter and open to international applicants as well as 'Team GB' :)

So without further ado -

Here's what you could win:

The prize consists of a handmade envelope pouch {see here} great for keeping your passport and tickets safe inside your hand luggage. A little book of BIG ideas, perfect for jotting down all of your thoughts whilst on holiday as well as an 'oh hello' card, so that you can write a lovely letter to a friend back home and send it like a postcard!

Ta DA! So firstly can I just say - how cool is this? My very very first GIF! Please say it works on your screens..if not I might just cry a little tear!

Today's happy happy Friday post is a another little DIY. Having just come back from a little summer holiday it struck me that I could do with something small and cute to pop a few essentials in in my hand luggage bag to avoid the numerous sessions scrabbling around in my handbag, at check in, passport control, security...etc etc.

With those thoughts in mind I decided to make a

really

simple little envelope pouch. No mad skills needed, no sewing machine needed - just a little bit of dedication and some creativity!

Without further ado then, here is how

you

can make your very own handy little pouch...

p.s. you do actually also need a needle and thread - I just forgot to photograph these! {oops}

1. Unfold your envelope and place it on your fabric, draw around your envelope.

2. Remove the envelope and cut around your shape.

3. Fold your envelope to make sure it does all overlap nicely.

{at this point I moved outside as it was such a nice day!}

4. Take your paint and decorate your fabric however you so desire!

5. Once the paint is dry, re-fold your fabric and pin down the front seams.

{I got too hot so I moved inside again!}

6. Roughly stitch from one edge to the other, making sure you don't sew the flap to the pouch's back panel!

{I used a bright neon thread here to really make a feature of the stitching but you can just as easily blend it to the same colour as your fabric if you prefer.}

7. repeat on the other side {apologies for the shoddy first stitches above!!}

8. I choose at this point to attach a gold glitter heart which I cut from some glitter fabric {amazing I know!} but you can use anything you like - buttons, beads, sequins etc etc. I simply used a hot glue gun to attach this to the fabric.

That's it. You're done. It's super easy and super cute, now all you need to do is fill it!

Just popping by today with a little lunch time post to get you excited about next weeks upcoming competition over here on the blog! Yes, that's right - I will be hosting my very first competition...yay!

Keep an eye out over here as in the coming days I will enlighten you on just how you could get your hands something rather lovely...just perfect in fact, for this gorgeous summer weather...

{I'm super excited!}

p.s. I totally took this picture this morning outside my flat...gorgeous eh?

Hope everyone's weekend was lovely - the weather certainly helped with that I'm sure - let's hope this continues now until October eh?

Just a little post today to keep you all updating on what's going down in the shop and what's coming up in the coming weeks...

It would seem that I am by no means alone out in this big old World in my love for stationery. My 'Big Book of Ideas' has been selling very well and I've had a lot of interest lately in all of my notebooks, so I've decided to concentrate on filling the shop with a few more very pretty, hand illustrated notebooks. Summer is the time to plan, travel and get things done and what better way to keep your thoughts coherent than in a lovely little (or big) book!

Here is the first addition, some of you may have already seen it but for those that haven't...ta da!

I absolutely love this little beauty as it appeals to my love of Kraft paper (its front cover) but has a myriad of rainbow coloured pages within that you can doodle on, write lists on, or just flick through and admire - whatever takes your fancy!

Here, is my hoard of different supplies I came back with on a recent trip into London, my fave is by far the enormous rainbow journal - it's square {swoon} and has even more different rainbow colours than the mini one {yay}.

So, keep an eye out on Twitter {@ohnorachio} and Facebook {I have a page you can 'Like'} for more details on things to come...

oh and one more thing...I have a competition coming up...more news on this later! {eek!}